There is a reason why I would never use such service like Prismatic. The main problem for me here is that it creates a confined universe for you where you are surrounded by only "relevant" information. For example I don't care much about fashion, but once in a while reading NY Times I stumble upon a very interesting articles about new trends in fashion or its history. It makes me think out of the box and expands my knowledge. There is no way a service like Prismatic would provide me with such articles based on my interests.
But what was a little surprising is that there were no handsets for the press to play with. There were some demonstration units carefully attended by PR personnel, and while we were able to get kind of close to them, the general rule was "you can look but you can't touch."
Looking at this [1] video I would say that this article is just another BS from Ars.
The big difference of drugs from alcohol and tobacco is their addictiveness. While you can't get addicted to alcohol or tobacco after one use, certain drugs cause severe addiction after first dose. Of course you can legalize only mild drugs. But it won't solve the problem because as we see this business is mostly about very addictive ones.
It's just a technical failure. The trading was stopped for about 4 hours. After reopening the stock market fell 2.5 percent. No official statement was made about what caused the failure.
In US (not counting downtowns of large Cities like NY or SF) it is much harder to enjoy walking compared to most other places in the world.
First you just look weird here when you walk somewhere and you are the only person walking in the street. Drivers usually look at you like you are crazy (especially if you walk in the evening when it's getting dark).
The second and most annoying thing is that sidewalks here can end suddenly without a warning. You can walk somewhere enjoying the nice weather and the sidewalk ends suddenly! WTF? You have to turn back or continue walking using the side of the road looking even more weird.
And the most strange thing is that Americans use their cars to drive to places located within just a couple of thousand feet from their home. For a person from Europe THIS is really weird.
There is an excellent book "Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the China Production Game" by Paul Midler [1] for those who want to know more about behind-the-scenes of China's manufacturing.
One problem with induction cooking is that you have to use cookware made of ferromagnetic metal. For other pots an interface ferromagnetic disk is required.
Microsoft BitLocker in its most secure mode is the gold standard because it protects against more attack modes than other software. Unfortunately, Microsoft has only made it available with certain versions of Microsoft Windows.
Though MS says that BitLocker doesn't have back doors [1], I wonder how true this actually is...
- standard multithreading support (<threads.h> header)
- atomic operations (<stdatomic.h> header)
- type-generic macros (sqrt translates to sqrt, sqrtf, sqrtl depending on argument type)
- Unicode support (char16_t and char32_t types)
- gets function is removed from the standard (use gets_s)
- static assertions
- aligned memory allocation (aligned_alloc)
- anonymous structures and unions
- no-return functions (specify functions that never return)
- exclusive access for opened files ("x" in fopen)
- macros to create complex numbers
- additional way to terminate the program (quick_exit and at_quick_exit)
In scientific computing it's not unusual to get 2x-3x speedups by doing simple optimizations like this one. For desktop applications it's nothing, but when your simulation is taking a week to complete then 2x-speedup is a huge improvement.